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zotero-agent

Clean 500 items

The problem

Section titled “The problem”

You imported a few hundred references and the metadata is a mess: inconsistent dates, missing publishers, TITLE IN ALL CAPS, junk left over from a PDF scrape. Editing them one at a time in the Zotero UI is hopeless, and true batch editing of metadata for multiple items is one of the longest-standing Zotero feature requests — open on the forums since 2016. zotero-agent does it locally, and undoably.

Via an AI agent

Section titled “Via an AI agent”

“In collection Imports 2024, normalize titles to sentence case, set any missing publisher on the book items to the value I gave you, and tag everything #cleaned. Dry-run first, show me a sample of before/after, then apply.”

The agent reads the collection, proposes the JSONL edit, previews it, and applies it with a snapshot so you can undo. You approve the values; the CLI does the writing.

Via the CLI

Section titled “Via the CLI”

The batch primitive is zot apply, fed a JSONL file — one edit per line:

{"key":"ABCD1234","set":{"title":"Digitalization and society","date":"2021"},"addTags":["cleaned"]}
{"key":"EFGH5678","set":{"publisher":"MIT Press"},"addTags":["cleaned"]}
{"key":"IJKL9012","set":{"date":"2019"},"addTags":["cleaned"],"removeTags":["raw-import"]}

Each line may carry set, addTags, removeTags, addToCollection, and trash. Then:

Terminal window
zot apply edits.jsonl --dry-run    # preview every change, no writes
zot apply edits.jsonl              # apply — snapshots affected items first

To build edits.jsonl at scale, export the collection, decide the values (by hand, a script, or an agent), and emit one line per item:

Terminal window
zot export "Imports 2024" --format json --out imports.json
# ... produce edits.jsonl from imports.json ...

Safety net

Section titled “Safety net”
Terminal window
zot backup                          # snapshot zotero.sqlite before a big run
zot apply edits.jsonl --dry-run     # confirm the diff
zot apply edits.jsonl               # snapshots automatically
zot undo last                       # full rollback if anything looks wrong

zot apply snapshots the affected items before writing, so zot undo last restores them exactly. Disable auto-sync during the run so a mistake doesn’t propagate to zotero.org.